Bulletin Board 16

Life lessons from Bill Harlan, style inspiration from Trunk's Mats Klingberg, and what I'll be wearing all winter

Moodboard at the Sid Mashburn store in Atlanta

THE SCENT

I’ve been lucky enough to go to Solomeo (the HQ of Brunello Cucinelli) twice in the last couple of years—most recently this summer for the launch of their wine—and previously to do a story on their MTM for the magazine. Clearly I’m a big fan of Brunello Cucinelli--their clothes and accessories, but further, Brunello's philosophy of living life and taking care of everything and everyone around him is so admirable. (I love that he enforces a ninety-minute lunch break for all of his employees in Solomeo, during which they can either go home and eat with their families, or enjoy free local food in the company canteen. (I have had lunch there and it’s amazing!)

Recently, Cucinelli released his first fragrance for men (as well as one for women), as part of a tribute to a close perfumer friend of his who sadly passed away. I’ve been excited to check it out, first because I was curious about the scent he’d choose to define him, but also because it’s that time of year when I always like to change up my scent to mark the new season. 

I finally have it and I love it. It’s surprisingly subtle, and doesn’t weigh heavy on the skin. Cypress and juniper are the main elements here – inspired by the rows of trees and plants that line his Umbria headquarters — but there’s also some warm amber, a kick of black pepper, as well as some Calabrian bergamot to round things out. It also brings me back to the warm summer nights in the Italian countryside, a very welcome transport as we head into the winter season. 

MY UNIFORM

I’m so inspired by people’s personal style, and I’ve been wanting to do more of these uniform profiles. Our first (and only one!) was with our friend Elias Marte ages ago—but now that I have Louis Cheslaw working with me on this newsletter (we worked together at Traveler, and he was most recently at New York Magazine before moving back to London), I’ll be able to make this newsletter a richer (hopefully!) and more consistent experience. Once a month, we’ll be interviewing our favorite well-dressed men about their style—what they love to wear and how they wear it.

I can think of no better way to fire up this section than to hear from Mats Klingberg. After a career working for Giorgio Armani in Stockholm, then at American Express, in 2010 Mats founded Trunk Clothiers, a menswear store on Chiltern Street in London's Marylebone. His eye for quality is exceptional, shown in both the brands he carries and his own in-house lines of sharp tailoring, knits, and accessories. It’s been so successful that five years ago, he opened a second location in Zurich.

What is your standard color palette, and does it change seasonally?

I’m very much a navy, gray, beige and bits of green kind of guy, and that doesn’t change much throughout the year or across climates. I travel a lot and like to keep things simple, so most of the things I’ve got can be easily combined with each other.

When you think of your wardrobe, what are the basics that come to mind first?

Navy long sleeve polos. I have lots of, both from Trunk’s own label, but also the ice cotton ones from Zanone. They look great with a jacket and chinos, but also with a pair of shorts or for comfort on a long haul flight. (I’ve got some white and beige ones as well, but navy gets the most use for sure.)

As for the jacket, my navy Boglioli jackets in cotton and wool are both on heavy repeat (depending on which suits the weather conditions best). For the chinos, beige is the color I tend to wear most of the time and have lots of pairs of. I think we’ve done a good job with our own label ones at Trunk, so that’s what I wear the most, if not my Incotex pairs. 

I’ve also loved knitwear for as long as I can remember, so I have lots of crew and roll necks in different weights in navy, and again various tones of gray, beige, cream and green. That said, I’ve recently started wearing my old V-necks as well, and I’m enjoying that a lot, so I think it’s time for them to make a comeback.

Share your favorites for the following categories…

Trousers: Almost exclusively Trunk’s, but also Resolute denim from Japan, and those chinos from Incotex.

Knitwear: Again, we have a wide range of lovely knitwear in merinos, lambswool, cashmere and Shetlands, so that’s what I wear most of the time. But I also really like the chunkier knits that Batoner makes.

Footwear: Alden loafers, Paraboot lace-ups, and slip-ons from CQP.

Neckwear: I love my Begg x Co scarves, and my ties from Bigi — most of them in either navy or gray.

Outerwear: You’ll find me in Valstar most of the year, but in winter I love my Kaptain Sunshine coat.

What’s your travel kit? 

It’s been pretty much the same for several years now. A navy long sleeve polo from Trunk, a navy Boglioli jacket or green shirt jacket, a pair of our beige chinos, and some CQP slip-ons. All of the above are comfortable, but at the same time elegant enough for meetings or drinks pre- and post-flight. In the winter months, I just add a navy crew neck to that, plus a navy scarf from Begg x Co that also works as a cosy lightweight blanket. Oh, and for long haul flights, some lightweight cozy pants that I can easily fit in my tote bag and change into once airborne. 

What’s your style advice when traveling across different climates?

I’m just back from a trip to Japan that took me to Tokyo, which was hovering around 45°F in the mornings and evenings, but also to Okinawa, which was around 80°F, so I had to think especially hard as I don’t like to check my luggage. I was able to fit everything into a carry-on Rimowa, ranging from shorts, polos, t-shirts, flip flops and swimwear to shirts, trousers, sweaters, sweatshirts, running shoes, and jackets. So I guess my advice is, it’s possible to do it without checking! It helped of course to wear the warmer winter outerwear on the plane rather than packing it.

YOU SHOULD MEET

There’s always one story in the magazine that is more of a read than visual, and I’m going excerpt that here when it makes sense. In our fall issue, our deputy editor Alex Postman interviewed Bill Harlan, and when she sent through the transcript, I got really choked up. Hope his story inspires and impacts you as much as it did me.

Bill Harlan is the founder of Harlan Estate, Bond and Promontory, whose Napa Valley wines are among the most sought after in the world. In the 1970s, he also acquired and transformed the (then-derelict) Meadowood Napa Valley into the first major hotel in the region. But we think you should meet him because he has had the most singular life full of adventure and risk-taking—on motorcycles and boats, in cars and cockpits—and is a top-notch raconteur about the forces that conspired to shape his wildly successful wine business and epic 200-year plan. 

Where did you grow up and what were some of your early interests?

I grew up in Southern California, in the little town of Whittier. It was a Quaker town, so a dry town; no alcohol. I had wonderful parents. My father worked in a slaughterhouse for 47 years. My mother was a housewife. In those days, most women were housewives, unless they were a teacher or a nurse or a social worker. It was a wonderful place to grow up, at a great time.

How did you get into motorcycles?

That wasn't until I was in my teens. Surfing was probably the first thing we did beyond our little town, waterskiing, things that you do in Southern California. We were outside about 360 days a year. It was before you had any sort of weather forecasts, so some kid would call to give you an idea of what was going on. I did that until I moved to Northern California to go to school. The surfing wasn't nearly as good up here at that time. And so I got interested in motorcycles. I think my brother wanted one—I was two years older and my parents were very strict—so he told my father I ought to have a motorcycle, which cost less than a car, figuring if I got one, he could get one, too. So that's how it happened. It was a British bike called an AJS. I would ride it in the hills, and it wasn't long before I ran into these guys who were racing motorcycles and they said “Well, you ought to come to the races.” There was a motorcycle club called the Richmond Ramblers, about 10 minutes from Berkeley. They had a clubhouse and a track on the side of the hill, and also a sliding circle, where you could learn how to slide in sand, practice right turns, left turns, jumps and all that. We would race on Sundays. I loved it and lost my interest in surfing.

Did you roll from there into car racing?

That was much later. When I got out of school, it was the first time I felt a certain sense of freedom. I worked all through school, so I didn't owe a nickel to anybody. There's a saying that four wheels is great for transporting the body, but two wheels transport the soul. And so moving from a bike, I wanted to learn to fly. As a little kid during the war, you'd hear the Marines’ Hymn all the time. You know, we were fighting our country's battles on the land, air and sea. So the first thing I wanted to see was the land, then the air, and then the sea.

I had gone to England to get set up for my bike at the Matchless/Norton factory. This was in 1962 or ‘63. And the bike wasn't ready. So I asked the guys there, “Where are the girls in wintertime?” They said, “Well, the Canary Islands are a pretty place to go.” So I got down to Gibraltar and met some guys in a bar, and they said, “You’ve got plenty of girls back in California—there's a lot more interesting things going on in Marrakesh.” So, the next morning I took the ferry from Gibraltar to Tangier. And that was the beginning of an adventure I hadn't anticipated. I spent a couple of months in Marrakesh, which was quite traditional at the time. From there, I decided I’d hitchhike across North Africa to Egypt. I wanted to climb the pyramids and all that. But it was a difficult time to get visas, because it was the end of the colonial era, so the British had been pushed out and these countries were also fighting each other.

I got to Egypt and there were almost no tourists. No one stopped you from climbing the pyramids, and you could do anything you wanted to do. At that time, a book had come out by Alan Moorehead about the White Nile. I read it in Cairo and decided I wanted to go to the head of the Nile, and then into the heart of Africa and the Belgian Congo. From there, I decided I wanted to go to Cape Town. So that took a year of hitchhiking. And it gave me a chance to see new places by land. Literally living on the land—I never stayed in a hotel or ate at a restaurant. So I came back from that trip, went back to England to pick up my bike, and came home.

Is this when you learned to fly?

I needed to get a job. And yes, I wanted to learn to fly. So I got a job at the airport for a flying school so I could get free flying lessons. Once I started flying, I just loved it. I ended up starting my own flying school and earned enough money to buy my first little airplane. It wasn't a fancy plane or anything, but it was mine. I could go flying anytime I wanted to. Ninety-nine percent of all my flying was by myself, just going out and flying early in the morning before sunrise. I loved being in that totally free zone again.

The next thing I felt I needed to do was to get a job to learn about the sea. So I got a job as a merchant marine, but I had to learn celestial navigation. This was before GPS. The fellow who was going to hire me said if I went to the Morrison Planetarium and learned celestial navigation, I could get a job. A Stanford alum had donated this boat to the university, a 175-foot gaff-rigged topsail schooner built in 1935, a beautiful vessel. The boat was backed by the National Science Foundation to conduct oceanic research. So it gave me a chance to learn about the sea, learn the rules, and how important it is to be ready for storms—or anything, really.

The idea was to get my own boat and sail around the world. The thing was, my flying school wasn't necessarily profitable. I owed some money. So I felt the only way I could save enough money was if I didn't have any costs for room and board. And it seemed like going to sea was a way to pay off all my debts, learn about the sea, and be free one more time.

You clearly have a taste for risk and adventure. How did this serve you in other ways?

You learn a few lessons along the way from taking risks—how bad you're going to get hurt or how bad things could happen. You learn where the edge is, but you don't really know for sure until you go over it. My approach was to earn enough money to have the freedom to be able to do the other things I wanted to do.

I was now about 27 years old, still young. I mean, at the time I didn't think I was that young, because when I came back from a year in Africa, my girlfriend was still there. But when I came back from a year at sea, she said, Bill, if we don't get married this time, I’m going to marry another guy I met while you were gone. I didn't think she'd do it, but she did. Now I'm without a girlfriend, without a job, without any money. And I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to do. The girls weren't going for a dollar jug of wine on the back of a motorcycle anymore. So I had to find some way to earn money, but I wasn't qualified to get hired by anyone.

This was the late fifties, and existentialism was really an important influence at that time. Reading many of the existentialists from different walks of life, religious to agnostic, was a way of living in the here and now, living in the moment. It was an exciting place to be. But what I really needed at that point was to be able to live that way and also be able to evolve and progress. I needed enough money to have the freedom to try more things. So, I sold insurance, then I got into the securities business. I wasn’t too interested in wearing a coat and tie. Then I got into real estate. One day I ran into a guy who I knew from school in a bar, and he was selling land in the country up north. And he said, “Just come up.” And I said, “I already have a job.” He said, “Well, come up on the weekends.” And so I got into the business and earned enough money to start buying my own land. Earned enough to give me the freedom to do some of the things I wanted to do.

What was your first foray into wine?

I had visited Napa Valley when I was in high school, because it was less than an hour from Berkeley. Visiting wineries was always really interesting to me, the smells of a winery. As a student, I learned that if you have a press pass and a fancy camera, you can get into a lot of places without having to pay. Especially if you write for the school paper. So I had a friend who had one of those big cameras you put on your shoulder and looks really impressive. With the press pass, we could get in almost anywhere. So we did documentaries. One of them was a documentary on wine, where we got into the wineries behind the scenes. Well, this camera never really had film in it. We couldn't have afforded to develop the film if it did! But it gave us a way to learn about a lot of things that we wouldn't have been able to without it. And it was during that time that I got the romantic idea of someday buying a little piece of land, planting a vineyard, finding a wife, raising a family and making wine. But living in the country at that time, there was nothing going on for a single person.

I was working in the shipyard building barges. There, I built some old World War II vessels that were no longer commercially viable. I realized I could get some of them, put them on one of the steel-reinforced concrete barges that we’d build, and use them for a place to live. I got a few for myself – the first one was an old World War II Landing Craft. And then I had a tugboat, I had a submarine chaser. I ended up building a floating home community, it was the last free zone in California. There were no rules, you didn’t need any permits from anyone. It was a magical way to live, and drew a lot of interesting people who became almost like an art community — artists and dropouts and trust fund kids that weren’t really working but their parents gave them money. I did that for four or five years, and then I started my businesses on land. By the end of the seventies, I had earned enough money to plant a vineyard and make wine.

How did you learn the wine business?

Well, what really happened was that I bought this piece of land in Napa Valley [with a small hotel on it] and I got a call less than 60 days later from Robert Mondavi. Do you know who he is? He was the most famous figure in high quality wine in America at that time. He built the first winery of consequence. He invited me to lunch. You get a call from Mondavi, you show up and see what you can learn. He asked me why I’d bought this land. And I told him, well, I’d had this curious idea about making wine and this came along. But I know nothing about running a hotel, about restaurants or any of that.

So I told him my romantic idea about planting a vineyard and starting a family, and he said “Bill, the Napa Valley has a lot more potential than that. That piece of land you bought? I have an idea for it.” He wanted to create a wine auction. I had no idea what a wine auction was. He said it would be a charity auction, meaning you're not going to make any money with it. But he said, I'll help you get entitlements for a hotel-resort—the owners had lost theirs after the Napa agricultural preserve was formed, and had already put in money for the infrastructure for a golf course, tennis courts, a little restaurant, and a pool for the local winery people. Napa Valley was very different then, I would say maybe 20, 25 wineries at the time. So he said that he would help me get a permit to build more rooms and turn it into something that could be profitable.

Then he said, “Well, Bill, what I'd like to do is send you on a trip to give you some perspective.” So he sent me to Bordeaux and Burgundy, and introduced me to the owners of the finest wineries in the world, from the first growths to the grands crus. It was magical. I came back from that trip and my whole perspective on time had changed. These properties have been in families not only for generations, but centuries. I realized I had to think about a longer-term perspective. And so that's when I put together a 200-year plan. It's taken me from living moment-to-moment to having a perspective a hundred years in the past and a hundred years in the future, while still living each day in the moment.

What came to captivate you about wine?

First of all, it's agriculture. Being close to the land has always been important to me. But then also, once I got back from this trip with a vision of creating a first growth or a grand cru from California, it meant that it had to be really a fine wine. To do that, I had to hire someone who knew a lot more than I did about how to make wine at this level. If you want to be among the best in the world, you have to have the best people. You also have to build something that has purpose behind it, a dream or a vision that is greater than any of us as individuals. And hopefully it will last beyond our lifetime. So it's putting together a clarity of vision and also a purpose, and at the same time, building a culture where we all flourish.

And has your 200-year plan brought you to where you expected to be?

Well, I would say part of a 200-year plan is that if you don't make it from the first generation to the second, then you don't have much chance of getting to the third. The most important thing to me today is getting the next generation into it, fully engaged and loving it, not only believing in it, but living it. They’ve been working on it now for almost 20 years. And now we're working on the third generation of employees. We are a family and a family business, and our key people have been with us for a long time—38 to 43 years. We're working on creating something together, and they share our successes.

We haven’t talked about your cars. Tell us about them!

I've kept certain bikes and cars that I've had from each decade. I have about a dozen cars, including eight that have meant a lot to me. I have a 1930 Bentley Vanden Plas Speed 6, and a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing that I've had since 1963. There’s a 1966 Ferrari 275 GTB that I bought in ‘69. In those days, these cars didn't cost much. Today they're more valuable, but I wasn’t buying and collecting them to sell. I just loved them. I've also got a 1953 Allard J2X Two-Door Roadster that I've had since the late sixties. That's the car I raced the most. And a 1967 Jaguar E-Type convertible. I just love the looks of them, and I loved driving them at the age I was at that time. I still try to drive them all. Every 60 days they all get driven, depending on the weather.

And what kind of racing did you do?

It was more gentleman racing. There’s a lot of competition and if you're not in your prime, quick with your reflexes, sooner or later your physical body isn't going to be quite like it was. When you're younger, you can learn what risks to take and through experience you gain more wisdom, but then there comes a time when your physical body can't keep up with your wisdom. It’s time to race in a different age group.

Have you ever received a piece of advice that changed your life?

I would say two or three. I had a grandfather who wouldn’t let us use the word “can't.” It was always you “can” or you “won't,” but there's no such thing as can't. Whatever you want to do, you can do. Also, my parents had two rules of what to do, and what not to do. For the second, “Don't hurt yourself and don't hurt others.” And then for the dos, there was “Do what you know is right” and “Do your best.” That's pretty much it. Two rules of yes and two rules of no. As I got older, there was another one: Don't do anything that you wouldn't want on the front page of the paper tomorrow morning.

From racing I learned that you can't just be in that fraction of a second when making a decision on whether you should pass, or take a risk. When you're starting out, all you see is who's right in front of you, because there's nobody behind you. You’re just thinking about how you’re going to pass. As you start learning to pass and you fall down and get back on [a bike], you realize that you have to pass them again, and that's a whole lot more work. So, you learn to look a little further ahead. And then once you learn to pass, you can start worrying about the person behind you. But if you start worrying about the person behind you while trying to look ahead of you…well, you won’t be focused on where you want to go. So when you start to look at where you want to go, you want to look at the voids. You want to look at the space between the objects. You look at where you want to go, not the person you want to pass.